Story Noº 8 / 151: You Found Me Here

Noº 8/151: You Found Me Here
Collection: Sundays in the Solarium

Hope begins before you understand where you’re going.

You wake up one morning and realize you slept properly for the first time in weeks. You make coffee and notice it tastes like coffee again. You notice you’ve gone almost an hour without thinking about whatever broke you.

These things seem minor from the outside. But sometimes they are the first signs that a person has decided to remain in the world.

That was somewhere near the emotional beginning of this photograph.

The image was inspired by a song called Underground — one of the only songs that makes me cry if I try to sing it, so I usually avoid singing it altogether. In the song, someone wakes beneath the earth in complete darkness. No light. No sound. He speaks into the dark and hears only his own voice returned to him.

I’ve never woken underground. But I know heartbreak. And loneliness. And the peculiar feeling of watching the future you imagined for yourself collapse while the rest of the world continues behaving as though nothing has happened.

What stayed with me most about the song was the moment the fear begins to loosen its grip. Not disappear. Just loosen enough for movement to become possible again.

That feels true to me.

Most people do not climb out of difficult periods because they suddenly become hopeful. They rarely “believe” their way out first. Usually the body moves first and the mind catches up later.

I carried that idea with me while making this image.

When I originally sketched the photograph, I was working from a reference photo taken a few months earlier. But by the time we returned to the cave, the season had changed and the sunlight no longer reached deep inside it. The photograph I had planned was no longer possible.

At first, I worried the image might not work at all.

But the change forced us to rethink the pose in real time, and in retrospect, that made the final image more honest.

Instead of standing peacefully inside illumination, the man had to climb toward it.

Most people I know who have survived genuinely difficult periods clawed their way out inch by inch carrying whatever parts of themselves still functioned.

That’s what the pose finally became.

See the tension in the muscles of his back and arms?
He’s not a man waiting for the light.
He’s a man dragging himself toward it.

The flowers on his back reference an older work of mine called Sensitivity, photographed years ago in Miami with my friend Kevin Bermudez, who has since passed away.

In this photograph, before the rest of him has even reached the light, the flowers already have. They touch warmth first.

They are keeping him alive.

Tiny living receptors gathering evidence that rebirth might actually be possible.

I think hope often feels embarrassingly small at first.

A breath.
A step.
A hand against stone.

Just tiny biological evidence that something inside you still wants to continue.

The photograph is called You Found Me Here.
He’s still underground. But not for much longer.

If this was worth your time, pass it on.

This work will become a book.
Photographs and field notes by James Miille
Words by Jona Montoya